Gadgets: Cradlepoint CTR-350 Spreads the Broadband from Cellphone to Wi-Fi
Augustine: just what I wanted with my new iPod. My existing cell serves as WiFi hotspot for the iPod to connect to the internet and surf via Safari!
Friday, September 07, 2007
Jobs’ Mea Culpa is Apple’s Victory
I disagree with Om on this. I get this feeling that this is exactly what Steve Jobs had planned all along? The chances are high that that extra $100 you would have saved, had the iPhone been appropriately priced to begin with, would have been spent outside an Apple (AAPL) store. Now it's staying in Apple's coffers. And Steve Jobs looks like a caring, responsive CEO who didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings.
So Apple wins again. Forget the news stories that say Apple cut its price because sales were sluggish. On Tuesday, iSuppli, a research firm, said nearly one in 50 mobile phones sold in the U.S. was an iPhone, and that Apple was on track to sell 4.5 million iPhones this year. Today, iSuppli reiterated that view:
The iPhone outsold all competing smart-phone and feature-phone models in the United States in July on an individual basis. iSuppli�s teardown research indicates that Apple was generating a robust hardware margin at its previous pricing, and will still be profitable at the new pricing.
I suspect the money Apple makes off the iPhone will be a wash: What it loses in the new discount it will easily make up in holiday-season volume. And it will end the year with an even higher market share in handsets.
But what about Apple's stock? It fell to $132.93 this morning from a high of $145.73 Tuesday, a drop of nearly 9%. Again, the press has been quick to assert that Wall Street was disappointed with Jobs' announcements yesterday, particularly the iPhone price cut. But look at the 5-day chart, and it's clear that Apple is actually up. It was a classic case of buying the pre-announcement hype and selling on the news. It may even offer a last-chance to buy in at this level.
Over at Barron's Tech Trader Daily, there is a nice summary of analyst's preliminary reactions to the iPhone news. Bottom line, analysts were taken aback by the timing and the degree of the iPhone discount, but overall they remained "fairly enthusiastic" and few dared to lower their ratings or price targets.
Apple does not take pride in disappointing investors, and it may be that this iPhone discount, coming sooner rather than later, is a way of signaling that iPhone sales have been strong enough that it can lower prices without missing targets.
Simple hackery enables free iTunes ringtones
Well, this is a handy (and well-timed) find! User Cleverboy over at Macrumors has discovered a simple trick to get your own music onto your iPhone using the just-released iTunes 7.4, and it'll cost you precisely nothing. To get this to work, we hear you only need to rename an AAC track to .M4R, then double click it and iTunes will automagically load it into iTunes for you. Next time you plug in your iPhone to sync up, just check off the song in the Ringtones tab and voila, instant tone gratification. Thanks, Apple -- free ringtones for the songs we already own or ripped from our own CDs, this is how it should have been from the get-go. On a happy note, Macrumor's forum users are reporting the magic works via both Apple and Windows flavors of iTunes, but feel free let us know how you all get on.
Physicists have 'solved' mystery of levitation
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/06/nlevitate106.xml
Last Updated: 1:41am BST 08/08/2007
Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.
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In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible.
Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an 'incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.
Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.
Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.
The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.
The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a “dry glue” effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.
Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attact.
Because the Casimir force causes problems for nanotechnologists, who are trying to build electrical circuits and tiny mechanical devices on silicon chips, among other things, the team believes the feat could initially be used to stop tiny objects from sticking to each other.
Prof Leonhardt explained, “The Casimir force is the ultimate cause of friction in the nano-world, in particular in some microelectromechanical systems.
Such systems already play an important role - for example tiny mechanical devices which triggers a car airbag to inflate or those which power tiny 'lab on chip’ devices used for drugs testing or chemical analysis.
Micro or nano machines could run smoother and with less or no friction at all if one can manipulate the force.” Though it is possible to levitate objects as big as humans, scientists are a long way off developing the technology for such feats, said Dr Philbin.
The practicalities of designing the lens to do this are daunting but not impossible and levitation “could happen over quite a distance”.
Prof Leonhardt leads one of four teams - three of them in Britain - to have put forward a theory in a peer-reviewed journal to achieve invisibility by making light waves flow around an object - just as a river flows undisturbed around a smooth rock.
DivX sues Universal Music Group over Stage6: some analysis
Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson , who founded the famously RIAA-sued MP3.com, shares some thoughts on a lawsuit filed this week by DivX against Universal Music Group. UMG is also in a tussle with the online video service Veoh, over similar issues.
Michael says:
Divx filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against UMG asking courts to affirm the legality of their Stage6 video hosting site. This is the second San Diego based company to engage media companies in court. The first was Veoh who also sued UMG. What does this mean? I would speculate the following:Link to DivX's press release today, with the headline "DivX Requests Federal Court Affirmation of DMCA Protection for Stage6." (via pho list, reposted with permission)- UMG must be sending out threatening demand letters to many companies.
- Tech companies are getting more savvy wih legal options and realizing the value of playing offense, not just defense.
- San Diego is building some institutional expertise. DivX was started by Jordan Greenhall, who worked at MP3.com in the early days. Other former MP3.com people are at DivX. One coincidence is that divx has occupied the last 2 office buildings that MP3.com used. They watched MP3's unsuccessful legal battles and maybe learned some things. Veoh was founded by Dmitry Shapiro, a friend of mine who is very smart.
Be interesting to watch this play out. I predict it won't be the "lamb to slaughter" that MP3.com was, for many reasons.
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